3’s email help: do the thing you’ve already done

I’ve recently bought the excellent Nokia E71 on 3, mostly because for £25 a month I get 300 minutes of anytime texts or voice calls, 1GB of 3G downloads and, most importantly, unlimited email. For the most part the service is excellent and I always seem to have a signal and 3G coverage.

One of the things that attracted me to 3 was the Email on 3 service, which provides push email via a small application that installs on the handset. For well-known accounts, such as Gmail and Hotmail, it’s incredibly simply to set up: I just had to type in my account details to get my email pushed directly to my handset.

Brilliant, I thought, time to set up my work email, which should have been easy. Email on 3 supports Outlook Web Access (OWA) - the web front end to corporate Exchange servers. It should connect to this service and synchronise so that email read or deleted on the phone is marked as read or deleted on the server.

Now, while it seems to work with some OWA accounts, it decided not to work with Computer Shopper’s email. Unfortunately, this is where it all gets a little bit Groundhog Day.

Before you select that your company uses OWA the on-screen instructions read: “Select Options -> Use OWA if your corporate Exchange server allows Outlook Web Access (OWA). Otherwise, select Options -> Sign up now.”

With OWA not working, I decided to select Sign up now, where I was asked: “Enter your work email address on the next screen. An email message with sign-up instructions will be sent to you immediately.”

I did that and got the following helpful message: “On your PC, please follow the instructions in the email you just received to connect the Email on 3 service to your email account.”
I waited, excitedly, for the promised email to turn up with my full instructions, when this comes through: “To get started with Email on 3, open the application on your phone and select ‘Add Account’.”

What a stunningly brilliant bit of advice: I should just use the option that I’ve already used to get it to send me an email telling me to do what I’ve already done. I don’t think that could be any clearer or any more helpful.

Surprisingly, things can actually get worse if you use the Sign In on this Device option instead of trying to add an account. This brings up the: “Enter your User Name and Password on the next screen. The User Name and Password are those you use to access your email at work.” Sounds good, so far...

It continues: “You selected the connector ID when you set up your service, or it is shown in your welcome email.”

Sadly, neither of the above cases is true. So, what to do? The obvious answer was to search the internet for some help, only there’s one problem: Email on 3 as a search phrase doesn’t work very well as 3 has chosen a non-search-engine-friendly name for its service. You see, searching for this term, brings up any matches that use that sentence, such as forum posts asking ‘Can I get email on 3?’ or new stories saying ‘Get unlimited email on 3’. In fact, there are millions of hits out there that link to loads of bits of information that are of no practical use in this situation. Why couldn’t 3 have called its push email service, 3mail or Push3, or anything that would actually turn up a decent hit in Google? Adding ‘Connector ID’ to the search term brings up exactly nothing, as does searching 3’s own website for this term.

Sighing, I decided to turn to the last resort: phoning for technical support. Unfortunately, 3, like a lot of companies, has decided to out-source its call centre to a foreign country. There’s nothing wrong with this in principle, but practically I may as well have dialled a random number and asked whoever answered the phone for help.

The main reason for this is that I couldn’t really understand the person on the other end of the line, while they found it difficult to understand exactly what I was asking. This situation was amplified by the fact that I needed help with something that wasn’t on the standard problem solving flowchart that call centres tend to have.

In my case, a very slow conversation (if that’s the word for it) took place, where I’d say something and the call centre guy would repeat it slowly back to me. It was like talking to an old and slightly deaf aunt, only I wouldn’t pay that aunt £25 a month for the privilege. I would say that I got nowhere fast, except it took an excruciatingly long time.

The upshot was that the call centre didn’t have any idea what Email on 3 was, what a Connector ID was or how it was all supposed to be set up. Talking to someone that doesn’t have English as a first language also meant that it was practically impossible to describe exactly what the problem was and where I should go for help. So, I gave up.

Fortunately for me, Nokia is brilliant and the E71 has an application called Mail for Exchange. Once installed, this will connect to an Exchange server via OWA, synchronise email, contacts, calendar and to-do lists without sending me a pointless email or making me phone anyone. Why couldn’t I have just used that in the first place?